Author: Dave

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Fair Trial and Labour’s ‘fast track’

A note on Labour’s ‘fast track’ disciplinary process and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Labour’s disciplinary determination process for complaints that allege prejudice or harassment were changed at Conference 2019. The investigation is conducted by staff, who then present a charge and proposed sanction to a panel/sub committee of the NEC Disputes committee who then make a judgement and impose a penalty (or not). This decision is subject to appeal to the NCC on specific criteria, … Continue reading “Fair Trial and Labour’s ‘fast track’” →

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ECHR Article 11, Freedom of Association

I am brought to consider Article 11, of the ECHR and “Freedom of Association”. The second thing totalitarian parties do is register, regulate and then ban opposition political parties. And so I am concerned about the over-regulation of political parties. Here as ever are my notes. Continue reading “ECHR Article 11, Freedom of Association” →

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Labour, local government candidates and women

This is a note on Labour selections, specifically around positive action programmes for women. I live in a London borough which elects all its council every four years from multi-member wards using FPTP. Certain by-elections must be selected using all-women short (AWS) lists. Here are my notes … Continue reading “Labour, local government candidates and women” →

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Cross Border Data & Brexit

The Daily Mirror commented on the impending end of the Brexit transition period and SME compliance with any new data protection rules. They have a couple of Govt. officials and ministers saying that people had better get ready. In my linkedin post on the topic, I suggest it might be a  bit late and we still have a moving target because we don’t know if there’s going to be a post transition deal; one is necessary to establish adequacy equivalence while our application for adequacy is considered.

The Mirror story was hooked onto an ICO statement, whose advice is most recently posted here, we should note that the advice does not apply to the US nor Switzerland. Basically they advise creating data exchange contracts with your correspondents, using “standard contractual clauses”. Unfortunately, due to the ruling from the ECJ known as “Schrems II”, contracts will be needed for each correspondent. I am surprised that no-one is offering an aggregator service.

The Schrems II ruling places a big question mark over the US Privacy Shield and thus the Adequacy compliance of the US owned cloud & SAAS providers. I found this summary at Field Fisher’s site.

This ruling declared invalid reliance on the EU-US Privacy Shield as a lawful mechanism for exporting data to the US, due to concerns about surveillance by US state and law enforcement agencies (and with the subsequent effect that the Swiss-US Privacy Shield has also suffered a similar fate in the past day).  It upheld the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (“SCCs”) as a lawful mechanism for data exports, but subject to an assessment of the recipient territory’s laws and the potential need to put in place “supplementary measures” to ensure that exported EU data remains protected to a standard that is “essentially equivalent” with EU law.

This is going to be very difficult and the UK exceptions and law enforcement powers may make Adequacy hard to achieve. Neither the Commission, nor the US Govt want to stop the flows of personal data but the law’s the law and many of the EU’s citizen’s are the children of fascist and stalinist societies and consider privacy and the scale enabled by automation to be real threats to liberty.

ooOOOoo

The ICO hosts its advice at this page.

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Guaranteed minimum notice

I am surprised to learn of a minimum statutory notice period in employment law, defined by the Employment Rights Act 1996 §86; it’s one week/year subject to a 12 week cap, if you’ve worked for them for over two years. This may not be over-ridden by the contract of employment and will apply if the reason for termination/dismissal is redundancy. For more, press the “Read More” button. Continue reading “Guaranteed minimum notice” →

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Data analytics and democracy

Today, privacy campaigners have been circulating tweets about Brittany Kaiser’s document dump proving that Cambridge Analytics and AIG were working as a single entity. This would seem somewhat contrary to what the police and the ICO have been able to find. There’s more to find here and when I find it, I’ll post the stories here. Continue reading “Data analytics and democracy” →

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Technical Debt

When I first heard the phrase “Technical Debt”, I nearly fell of my chair, but recently, a couple of articles have passed me by and I thought I’d have look and think about if it helps address the intractable problem of maintaining legacy technology, but particularly applications code. The problem is that to make changes, one often has to amend code that’s already in use. This increases the cost of the project. The increase in cost to new projects is part of the “Technical Debt”, however, it’s basically a metaphor. Is the problem one that financial management tools, can be used to improve the understanding of? Does this apply better to code that one has development rights to, rather than packages or infrastructure? Here as every are my notes and links. Continue reading “Technical Debt” →